Costco Wholesale ( COST 1.57% ) has been lagging behind the broader stock market recently, but the retail giant may have deserved a break. The stock has still crushed the market over the long haul.

How a $10,000 Costco bet would have gone in six months

Let's say you invested $10,000 in Costco stock six months ago, enabled your brokerage's dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP), and left the stock alone. That position would be worth $8,769 by Dec. 9. That's a total return of negative-12.3%, or an annualized return of negative-22.8%.

Putting the same money in an S&P 500 ( ^GSPC +0.67% ) index fund instead would have resulted in a single-ticker portfolio worth $11,480. And the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index ran even further ahead; an index tracker such as the Invesco Nasd

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